Congratulations to our student Liuqi (Yuki) Zhu, who passed her viva with minor corrections on June 17, 2025! Her examiners, Professor Jason Rothman (internal) and Professor Jorge González Alonso (external), praised the originality and rigour of Yuki’s work and recommended the award of the PhD.

Yuki’s dissertation—Statistical learning of morphology in adult L2 learners: Effects of L1 morphological richness, redundancy, and salience—investigates how adults acquire grammatical morphology in a new language through exposure to cross-situational input. Through three carefully designed experimental studies, she examined how learners’ first language background, the redundancy of cues in the input, and the perceptual salience of morphemes shape success in learning features like tense and number. Her findings contribute to current debates on L1 transfer, cue competition, and implicit learning in adult second language acquisition.

Yuki was jointly supervised by Professor Patrick Rebuschat (Linguistics) and Professor Padraic Monaghan (Psychology), co-directors of Lancaster’s Language Learning Lab.

We are very grateful to the examiners for their time, care, and constructive feedback on Yuki’s thesis.